7 ms·

The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here

76 points by QueensGambit 2y ago

intalentive 2y ago
>First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online). Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.
- soneca 2y ago
  If you can pay the influencer game that might be a good path. There are influencers of all sizes, it can scale accordingly (maybe not equally effective for all sizes for all niches, though).
- Gshaheen 2y ago
  To add to this, while this approach may work for long tail, transactional sales with low ACVs, and work very well, it will not work for larger strategic/enterprise deals. Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.
  - ivan_gammel 2y ago
    Relationship may be secondary in a large SaaS company (you may see new key account once a year or two), but 6 figures mean paying by invoice, custom discounts and there will be inevitably some KYC process. CEO or CCO can do it and in boutique business they do it, but you probably cannot have lots of customers AND such deals at the same time.
  - 6stringmerc 2y ago
    As a career proposal specialist, I’m in complete agreement with you. Large deals take significant pursuit and documentation…at the Fortune level enterprise or for regional / state-level agreements in the US, it’s a highly competitive process. I’ve seen this first hand in SaaS sales for municipal clients and it’s simply a cost of doing business for certain markets. AI can’t be trusted with proposal responses that may be catastrophic in the contract phase.
- esafak 2y ago
  What kind of a world do you have to be living in to think that salespeople are not needed because the Internet exists?!
kubb 2y ago
So the secret sauce was the filesystem?
- Ancapistani 2y ago
  I read it as “The DeepSeek team, though very small, accomplished what would have taken a much larger team before the introduction and adoption of genAI tools”
fxwin 2y ago
This just reads like a fluff piece to advertise their own products, and the conclusions in the summary are the kind of vague handwavey promises AI bros have been making for the past 3 years > Take our own experience: Neartail competes with Shopify and Square, and it’s built by one person. Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot—built by one person. Would like it better if claims like this were backed up by numbers.
OutOfHere 2y ago
As software engineer jobs get culled (citing the excuse of AI), I strongly urge experienced senior software engineers to flip the game, becoming AI-assisted solopreneurs instead. If you're sufficiently intelligent, you don't even need VC money to bootstrap it. Here are some income models: Service: 1. pay-by-use 2. subscription Software: 1. open-source with paid new feature development 2. sales (on app stores) Physical products: 1: Resell from China in West 2. Develop new from China/anywhere and sell globally. Let big sites like Amazon and Walmart do the marketing and fulfillment.
- varispeed 2y ago
  This is crazy how fast you can build things today. But you need to understand what AI is spitting out and make decisions what to include, what to reject and how to ask it to create things. Ironically, this is almost like you would talk to your employees to make things for you.
  - EternalFury 2y ago
    Yes, you must be able to recognize the right answers and separate them from the hallucinations and crappy engineering. Maybe it’ll get to a point where even people who don’t have a clue can click Apply and never have to worry, but it’s not quite there yet. If it does get there, I’ll find another occupation; it’s not like my job ever defined me as a person.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    > this is almost like you would talk to your employees to make things for you It is, except that the result is almost immediate and almost for free.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  Payment or funding models have never been the problem. Those are menus you choose from, not tricky parts you have to come up with from scratch. Thinking of a single product idea I feel has enough chance to succeed to be worth working on, is the entire problem. After 25 years of never once thinking of one, I doubt that's going to change.
chasely 2y ago
> This was possible because AI helped write the file system. I have my doubts
jpollock 2y ago
"For example, the future of CRM isn’t just software—it’s software + sales team. Startups that don’t want to hire salespeople will eagerly adopt AI-driven CRMs that automate outreach, and follow-ups." I'm not involved in either side of this part of the business. Doesn't this read as "smarter spam"? Does that result in long-term customers? Perhaps I'm just not aware of just how down-and-dirty the top of the funnel is? My emotional response is: If you don't value _my_ time (as the customer), why should I consider your product?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
vallode 2y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about the take on "disappearing pillars". I think that knowledge and expertise in the different "pillars" the author describes has become easier to access, reducing the moat around the individual pillars and allowing greater overlap between professions. So while you might not need a "sales team", you do need "sales knowledge". Cloud solutions are amazing until they are not and you need "infra knowledge" to understand where you are going wrong and to evaluate potential solutions. I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars". The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals. Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).
light_triad 2y ago
The incumbents have an advantage in distribution and adding AI as features in mature products. AI makes devs more productive but the need for moats still applies and competition will be worse not better. Distribution and defensibility is key
ivan_gammel 2y ago
A lot of bold statements unsupported by data or even sufficiently deep understanding of the mentioned things. Like for example this: > Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot It is not a CRM system and it is far from addressing the needs of users of real CRMs. Of course, an early stage startup or a business with less than 1000 customers can handle leads in Google Forms. But that is a lot to handle. AI does not replace software engineering. It can enhance productivity on certain types of tasks, but AI is doing terrible job on something that mildly deviates from SO answers. It cannot build something like CRM or anything with rich domain. It is absolutely possible to go solo today, but it’s not because of AI. Tech founder can just write a lot of good code. Business founder won’t get past outsourced no-code solution.
- QueensGambit 2y ago
  Author of the post here. This is a misunderstanding of CRM given how customer relationships have evolved over the last 20 years. Salesforce didn’t copy Siebel - it moved sales tracking to the cloud. HubSpot didn’t copy Salesforce - it focused on inbound leads. We’re not trying to build every feature of a traditional CRM. We’re focusing on Google Forms as CRM for SMBs because they already use Forms + Sheets to manage leads. Wrote another post explaining how we use it as a CRM - https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use-google-forms-as-a-crm.anc-782c1657-2fff-40fd-9c91-d4b5b4eb90a4.html https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...
gatienboquet 2y ago
Shopify will use AI too and add way more values on their product soon also ? The need for IA Programmer will be x10 too.
joshdavham 2y ago
It's hard to agree with your conclusion that AI will start to replace the need for developers when the premises of your argument aren't even correct. > First, the internet killed the need for sales teams This is simply not true. Sales teams are absolutely still needed and continue to provide lots of value, especially in b2b. > Then, serverless computing eliminated IT teams I'm honestly left scratching my head here. This is not true at all! > And now, AI is breaking the last barrier—software development itself. ...
- gatienboquet 2y ago
  A sales team is even more important! Actual humans to talk to you—this is the future! The demand for non-automated, human tasks will skyrocket. Our society will shift back to being human-centric, just like before any automation.
- edgarvaldes 2y ago
  Yeah the premise of the article is totally wrong.
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  It's like someone took the most extreme hype for a bunch of past shifts, all of which have already played out so we know they definitely did not work out that way, as if all the hype described what had actually happened, then also took the same hype for "AI" and assumed all that's going to be, or is, true, too.
- logicfiction 2y ago
  I think they presented it wrong for impact. If instead of "killed" and "eliminated" they were saying that the internet made it possible to proceed without a sales team and that cloud computing made it possible to not need a bare metal IT team, it makes a little more sense. That is to say, it's not going to be the most effective way, but it went from impossible to at least viable. Similar to music recording. It used to be you needed competent instrumentalists and access to a commercial recording studio. Now you can do it all at home on a laptop and it is viable, people are successfully doing it. But in large part the most successful music is still done using the same professionals that existed before.
CER10TY 2y ago
>While the giants are trapped in their own complexity, nimble teams can build and launch AI-native solutions that directly challenge established players. Target a bloated SaaS vertical, rebuild it from the ground up with AI at its core, and position it as the next-generation alternative. Is there _anyone_ that would jump ship to yet another SaaS just because it's "AI enabled"? Obviously it's all the rage for VCs right now, but I can't imagine switching to some other product simply because it has AI and mine doesn't.
- trollbridge 2y ago
  Just want I want: a SaaS vendor with even less customer service and that’s literally dependent on one single guy staying alive and motivated to work, or the entire service just gradually shuts down.
- no_wizard 2y ago
  Depends on how useful it is. There’s a product our marketing and copy writing teams use to write content and manage content and they were using the same tool successfully for years and recently switched to a different one because it had really good copy re-write AI and also caught grammatical errors really well. I forgot the name of the product in question but this is one example I can think of
- shikaan 2y ago
  If anything, I know people contemplated the opposite (i.e., finding a less hype-driven job) I think it's anyway not a strong reason to leave or stay, at this point. It's still "yet another technology", and I'd be surprised if it turned out to influence any decision in this regard. Curious if anybody has non-anectodal data
  - recursivecaveat 2y ago
    Mentioning AI as a feature is a turnoff for customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685 Annectodally, everyone I know who is not in the industry is somewhere on the spectrum of indifference to revulsion, literally no one who is not a technologist or an investor has a positive opinion of AI.
wkirby 2y ago
> An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team. What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks. That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.
- exe34 2y ago
  > If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. I'm not sure this follows - I find as team size grows, the amount of time spent on synchronization approaches asymptotically to 100%.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Great. So a team of 100 with LLMs is still faster than a team of 100 without even if they spend the same amount of time on synchronization? Or did I miss something here?
    - exe34 2y ago
      well if they have more slop to get through, they'll spend even more time going over the more slop to find the useful bits. imagine 97 of them believe the machine upfront and you have to convince them that the code is shit. shudders
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        Sure but maintenance is just part of the definition of productivity. You have to do maintenance too to be productive. (On long time scales)
- jrsj 2y ago
  Yeah I really don’t get why people keep hyping AI like this. It really doesn’t make things go that much faster. At best you’re able to generate prototypes more quickly + get better autocomplete. Nothing particularly revolutionary there. Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both. The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.
varispeed 2y ago
There is institutional prejudice against "Solopreneurs". The notion is that if you are doing the business alone, then it must be something wrong with you. Like, why didn't you attract any co-founders? Why you don't have a team behind you that supports you etc. etc. Basically they want to shoehorn outdated economic models onto emerging businesses and they way they operate. This is fuelled by the rich, who inherited their wealth and have no talents on their own, just want to get shares in "cool" things and appear in circle jerk magazines how they spotted this little company and took them to the next level etc. As solopreneur you are unlikely to get any grants and other government support too. There is always one question that shuts the conversation down: "What if you get hit by a bus?"
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  All of that mattered only for those that need much VC funding. With AI, the need for VC funding is minimized because you don't need employees anymore except for physical work. The key is in bootstrapping the solopreneurship by oneself.
seu 2y ago
Love it how people come up with "trends" based on just one or two things happening in a very short time.
keiferski 2y ago
The main problem with this is that presumably a 100-person team with AI will still outperform the individual with AI. The benefits will be adopted by organizations at every level. However I actually think the argument works for things that aren’t actually businesses and don’t really have competition. If for example you want to build an online encyclopedia about an obscure niche topic, or dialogue for an indie game, or do any number of other otherwise tedious and resource -heavy tasks, you can now do that with AI tools. This is what excites me the most about AI - not the prospect of outcompeting another business, but of making giant creative projects dramatically more feasible.
featherless 2y ago
I've been validating this sentiment almost every day. I left my job last year, after over a decade leading design and UX for iOS at Google, to pursue building a bootstrapped solopreneur startup, and the speed at which I've been able to build things out has been wild. There are entire domains that would have taken weeks or months for me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tech, that Claude has been able to knock out in a matter of minutes. It's like I have two full time junior engineers working with me at all times (with a similar amount of coaching + guidance required), and for $20/month. These are gains of easily 2x-10x productivity and I already consider myself to be fairly productive as a design engineer.
- xiande04 2y ago
  What are you working on and how's it going? I also started a solopreneur gig building apps.
  - featherless 2y ago
    http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/ http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/ — Sidecar, a personal automotive assistant. Sharing dev updates at http://threads.net/@featherless http://threads.net/@featherless, beta registration is here: http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/beta/ http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/beta/
  - featherless 2y ago
    It's going super well — Been having an absolute blast and the automotive community is incredible.
- teaearlgraycold 2y ago
  Keep in mind, switching from Google to startup without AI should get you a 2-10x productivity gain just from lack of bureaucracy alone. But I do agree LLMs are at their best when teaching you subjects you have adjacent knowledge in.
  - featherless 2y ago
aerhardt 2y ago
What a display of intellectual laziness and dereliction.
wetpaws 2y ago
[dead]
jrsj 2y ago
There is technology that can greatly benefit solopreneurs, but it isn’t AI. It’s just an evolution of the same tech that has been a huge benefit to early stage projects for awhile now. Knowing what you’re doing with highly productive tools like Rails or Laravel or whatever your preference is going to have a far greater impact than some LLM will.
EdwardDiego 2y ago
No infra team cos cloud? And AI will handle it? Oh my sweet summer child.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  AI does assist with developing an automated deployment pipeline. AI also assists with the use of CPU-efficient programming languages, e.g. Rust, Zig, etc. where one doesn't need a cluster of workers for a trivial service, where a single instance can be sufficient.
  - EdwardDiego 2y ago
    The word "assists" is wonderfully vague there. And lol at the "cluster of workers for a trivial service", you seem to enjoy erecting men of straw to knock down.
ant6n 2y ago
It seems, just as an example, that ycombinator does not like solo founders.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  The reason why VCs don't like solo founders is because VCs want the freedom and power to be able to kick out a founder. It is all the more reason for solopreneurs to detest VCs, to bootstrap their own thing instead.
merwerigh 2y ago
1. Insane statements 2. Lack of data 3. Advertising your own products I really thought it would be meaningful article but it just disappointed me :(
prmph 2y ago
The article starts out interesting: > But DeepSeek didn’t just build another AI model. They wrote their own parallel file system (3FS) to optimize costs—something that would have been unthinkable for a company of their size. This was possible because AI helped write the file system. I thought, hmm, now that’s interesting. But then the breathless leaps of faith comes quickly > Now, imagine what will happen in a couple of years—AI will be writing code, optimizing infrastructure, and even debugging itself. An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team. > This kind of disruption was previously limited to narrow consumer products like WhatsApp, where a 20-member team built a product that led to a $19 billion exit. But now, the same thing is happening in business applications that requires breadth Umm, not so fast, AI will not enable a couple of guys to write a robust production grade kernel in a couple of weeks or months, unless that kernel is simply a fork of Linux with some cosmetic tweaks. I always wonder, do the people making these sorts of pronouncements actually understand software? Have they built software of any significant size and depth? And then: > First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online). Sales teams have not been killed simply because distribution has moved online, although kind of sales people you need, and what they do, has certainly changed.
tetrisgm 2y ago
I remember when social media was the hype at the start of web2, and a bunch of people came in saying everything would be social. Then the same thing with cloud. Big data. Bitcoin. VR. Ethereum. Web3. NFTs. I mean AI is cool and it helps with some stuff. And it's also not going to be this epic panacea where rogue coders turn into the best entrepreneur they can be. To throw out such takes is just short sighted hype.

76 points by QueensGambit 2y ago

>First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online). Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.

soneca 2y ago
If you can pay the influencer game that might be a good path. There are influencers of all sizes, it can scale accordingly (maybe not equally effective for all sizes for all niches, though).
Gshaheen 2y ago
To add to this, while this approach may work for long tail, transactional sales with low ACVs, and work very well, it will not work for larger strategic/enterprise deals. Sales teams are alive and well in this area. I’ve been in GTM for nearly my entire career. I have yet to see a company closing 6+ figure deals on a credit card and without a relationship.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago
  Relationship may be secondary in a large SaaS company (you may see new key account once a year or two), but 6 figures mean paying by invoice, custom discounts and there will be inevitably some KYC process. CEO or CCO can do it and in boutique business they do it, but you probably cannot have lots of customers AND such deals at the same time.
- 6stringmerc 2y ago
  As a career proposal specialist, I’m in complete agreement with you. Large deals take significant pursuit and documentation…at the Fortune level enterprise or for regional / state-level agreements in the US, it’s a highly competitive process. I’ve seen this first hand in SaaS sales for municipal clients and it’s simply a cost of doing business for certain markets. AI can’t be trusted with proposal responses that may be catastrophic in the contract phase.
esafak 2y ago
What kind of a world do you have to be living in to think that salespeople are not needed because the Internet exists?!

kubb 2y ago

So the secret sauce was the filesystem?

Ancapistani 2y ago
I read it as “The DeepSeek team, though very small, accomplished what would have taken a much larger team before the introduction and adoption of genAI tools”

fxwin 2y ago

This just reads like a fluff piece to advertise their own products, and the conclusions in the summary are the kind of vague handwavey promises AI bros have been making for the past 3 years > Take our own experience: Neartail competes with Shopify and Square, and it’s built by one person. Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot—built by one person. Would like it better if claims like this were backed up by numbers.

OutOfHere 2y ago

As software engineer jobs get culled (citing the excuse of AI), I strongly urge experienced senior software engineers to flip the game, becoming AI-assisted solopreneurs instead. If you're sufficiently intelligent, you don't even need VC money to bootstrap it. Here are some income models: Service: 1. pay-by-use 2. subscription Software: 1. open-source with paid new feature development 2. sales (on app stores) Physical products: 1: Resell from China in West 2. Develop new from China/anywhere and sell globally. Let big sites like Amazon and Walmart do the marketing and fulfillment.

varispeed 2y ago
This is crazy how fast you can build things today. But you need to understand what AI is spitting out and make decisions what to include, what to reject and how to ask it to create things. Ironically, this is almost like you would talk to your employees to make things for you.
- EternalFury 2y ago
  Yes, you must be able to recognize the right answers and separate them from the hallucinations and crappy engineering. Maybe it’ll get to a point where even people who don’t have a clue can click Apply and never have to worry, but it’s not quite there yet. If it does get there, I’ll find another occupation; it’s not like my job ever defined me as a person.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  > this is almost like you would talk to your employees to make things for you It is, except that the result is almost immediate and almost for free.
alabastervlog 2y ago
Payment or funding models have never been the problem. Those are menus you choose from, not tricky parts you have to come up with from scratch. Thinking of a single product idea I feel has enough chance to succeed to be worth working on, is the entire problem. After 25 years of never once thinking of one, I doubt that's going to change.

chasely 2y ago

> This was possible because AI helped write the file system. I have my doubts

jpollock 2y ago

"For example, the future of CRM isn’t just software—it’s software + sales team. Startups that don’t want to hire salespeople will eagerly adopt AI-driven CRMs that automate outreach, and follow-ups." I'm not involved in either side of this part of the business. Doesn't this read as "smarter spam"? Does that result in long-term customers? Perhaps I'm just not aware of just how down-and-dirty the top of the funnel is? My emotional response is: If you don't value _my_ time (as the customer), why should I consider your product?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

vallode 2y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about the take on "disappearing pillars". I think that knowledge and expertise in the different "pillars" the author describes has become easier to access, reducing the moat around the individual pillars and allowing greater overlap between professions. So while you might not need a "sales team", you do need "sales knowledge". Cloud solutions are amazing until they are not and you need "infra knowledge" to understand where you are going wrong and to evaluate potential solutions. I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars". The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals. Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).

light_triad 2y ago

The incumbents have an advantage in distribution and adding AI as features in mature products. AI makes devs more productive but the need for moats still applies and competition will be worse not better. Distribution and defensibility is key

ivan_gammel 2y ago

A lot of bold statements unsupported by data or even sufficiently deep understanding of the mentioned things. Like for example this: > Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot It is not a CRM system and it is far from addressing the needs of users of real CRMs. Of course, an early stage startup or a business with less than 1000 customers can handle leads in Google Forms. But that is a lot to handle. AI does not replace software engineering. It can enhance productivity on certain types of tasks, but AI is doing terrible job on something that mildly deviates from SO answers. It cannot build something like CRM or anything with rich domain. It is absolutely possible to go solo today, but it’s not because of AI. Tech founder can just write a lot of good code. Business founder won’t get past outsourced no-code solution.

QueensGambit 2y ago
Author of the post here. This is a misunderstanding of CRM given how customer relationships have evolved over the last 20 years. Salesforce didn’t copy Siebel - it moved sales tracking to the cloud. HubSpot didn’t copy Salesforce - it focused on inbound leads. We’re not trying to build every feature of a traditional CRM. We’re focusing on Google Forms as CRM for SMBs because they already use Forms + Sheets to manage leads. Wrote another post explaining how we use it as a CRM - https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use-google-forms-as-a-crm.anc-782c1657-2fff-40fd-9c91-d4b5b4eb90a4.html https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/can-you-use...

gatienboquet 2y ago

Shopify will use AI too and add way more values on their product soon also ? The need for IA Programmer will be x10 too.

joshdavham 2y ago

It's hard to agree with your conclusion that AI will start to replace the need for developers when the premises of your argument aren't even correct. > First, the internet killed the need for sales teams This is simply not true. Sales teams are absolutely still needed and continue to provide lots of value, especially in b2b. > Then, serverless computing eliminated IT teams I'm honestly left scratching my head here. This is not true at all! > And now, AI is breaking the last barrier—software development itself. ...

gatienboquet 2y ago
A sales team is even more important! Actual humans to talk to you—this is the future! The demand for non-automated, human tasks will skyrocket. Our society will shift back to being human-centric, just like before any automation.
edgarvaldes 2y ago
Yeah the premise of the article is totally wrong.
alabastervlog 2y ago
It's like someone took the most extreme hype for a bunch of past shifts, all of which have already played out so we know they definitely did not work out that way, as if all the hype described what had actually happened, then also took the same hype for "AI" and assumed all that's going to be, or is, true, too.
logicfiction 2y ago
I think they presented it wrong for impact. If instead of "killed" and "eliminated" they were saying that the internet made it possible to proceed without a sales team and that cloud computing made it possible to not need a bare metal IT team, it makes a little more sense. That is to say, it's not going to be the most effective way, but it went from impossible to at least viable. Similar to music recording. It used to be you needed competent instrumentalists and access to a commercial recording studio. Now you can do it all at home on a laptop and it is viable, people are successfully doing it. But in large part the most successful music is still done using the same professionals that existed before.

CER10TY 2y ago

>While the giants are trapped in their own complexity, nimble teams can build and launch AI-native solutions that directly challenge established players. Target a bloated SaaS vertical, rebuild it from the ground up with AI at its core, and position it as the next-generation alternative. Is there _anyone_ that would jump ship to yet another SaaS just because it's "AI enabled"? Obviously it's all the rage for VCs right now, but I can't imagine switching to some other product simply because it has AI and mine doesn't.

trollbridge 2y ago
Just want I want: a SaaS vendor with even less customer service and that’s literally dependent on one single guy staying alive and motivated to work, or the entire service just gradually shuts down.
no_wizard 2y ago
Depends on how useful it is. There’s a product our marketing and copy writing teams use to write content and manage content and they were using the same tool successfully for years and recently switched to a different one because it had really good copy re-write AI and also caught grammatical errors really well. I forgot the name of the product in question but this is one example I can think of
shikaan 2y ago
If anything, I know people contemplated the opposite (i.e., finding a less hype-driven job) I think it's anyway not a strong reason to leave or stay, at this point. It's still "yet another technology", and I'd be surprised if it turned out to influence any decision in this regard. Curious if anybody has non-anectodal data
- recursivecaveat 2y ago
  Mentioning AI as a feature is a turnoff for customers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41126685 Annectodally, everyone I know who is not in the industry is somewhere on the spectrum of indifference to revulsion, literally no one who is not a technologist or an investor has a positive opinion of AI.

wkirby 2y ago

> An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team. What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks. That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.

exe34 2y ago
> If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. I'm not sure this follows - I find as team size grows, the amount of time spent on synchronization approaches asymptotically to 100%.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Great. So a team of 100 with LLMs is still faster than a team of 100 without even if they spend the same amount of time on synchronization? Or did I miss something here?
  - exe34 2y ago
    well if they have more slop to get through, they'll spend even more time going over the more slop to find the useful bits. imagine 97 of them believe the machine upfront and you have to convince them that the code is shit. shudders
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Sure but maintenance is just part of the definition of productivity. You have to do maintenance too to be productive. (On long time scales)
jrsj 2y ago
Yeah I really don’t get why people keep hyping AI like this. It really doesn’t make things go that much faster. At best you’re able to generate prototypes more quickly + get better autocomplete. Nothing particularly revolutionary there. Anyone claiming a generalized 100x, 10x, or even 2x productivity gain is either delusional or trying to sell you something. Possibly both. The companies saying they are reducing the size of their workforce because of gains they’re getting from AI are probably just telling investors what they want to hear while cutting costs for the same reason they always have.

varispeed 2y ago

There is institutional prejudice against "Solopreneurs". The notion is that if you are doing the business alone, then it must be something wrong with you. Like, why didn't you attract any co-founders? Why you don't have a team behind you that supports you etc. etc. Basically they want to shoehorn outdated economic models onto emerging businesses and they way they operate. This is fuelled by the rich, who inherited their wealth and have no talents on their own, just want to get shares in "cool" things and appear in circle jerk magazines how they spotted this little company and took them to the next level etc. As solopreneur you are unlikely to get any grants and other government support too. There is always one question that shuts the conversation down: "What if you get hit by a bus?"

OutOfHere 2y ago
All of that mattered only for those that need much VC funding. With AI, the need for VC funding is minimized because you don't need employees anymore except for physical work. The key is in bootstrapping the solopreneurship by oneself.

seu 2y ago

Love it how people come up with "trends" based on just one or two things happening in a very short time.

keiferski 2y ago

The main problem with this is that presumably a 100-person team with AI will still outperform the individual with AI. The benefits will be adopted by organizations at every level. However I actually think the argument works for things that aren’t actually businesses and don’t really have competition. If for example you want to build an online encyclopedia about an obscure niche topic, or dialogue for an indie game, or do any number of other otherwise tedious and resource -heavy tasks, you can now do that with AI tools. This is what excites me the most about AI - not the prospect of outcompeting another business, but of making giant creative projects dramatically more feasible.

featherless 2y ago

I've been validating this sentiment almost every day. I left my job last year, after over a decade leading design and UX for iOS at Google, to pursue building a bootstrapped solopreneur startup, and the speed at which I've been able to build things out has been wild. There are entire domains that would have taken weeks or months for me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tech, that Claude has been able to knock out in a matter of minutes. It's like I have two full time junior engineers working with me at all times (with a similar amount of coaching + guidance required), and for $20/month. These are gains of easily 2x-10x productivity and I already consider myself to be fairly productive as a design engineer.

xiande04 2y ago
What are you working on and how's it going? I also started a solopreneur gig building apps.
- featherless 2y ago
  http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/ http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/ — Sidecar, a personal automotive assistant. Sharing dev updates at http://threads.net/@featherless http://threads.net/@featherless, beta registration is here: http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/beta/ http://sidecar.clutch.engineering/beta/
- featherless 2y ago
  It's going super well — Been having an absolute blast and the automotive community is incredible.
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Keep in mind, switching from Google to startup without AI should get you a 2-10x productivity gain just from lack of bureaucracy alone. But I do agree LLMs are at their best when teaching you subjects you have adjacent knowledge in.
- featherless 2y ago

aerhardt 2y ago

What a display of intellectual laziness and dereliction.

wetpaws 2y ago

[dead]

jrsj 2y ago

There is technology that can greatly benefit solopreneurs, but it isn’t AI. It’s just an evolution of the same tech that has been a huge benefit to early stage projects for awhile now. Knowing what you’re doing with highly productive tools like Rails or Laravel or whatever your preference is going to have a far greater impact than some LLM will.

EdwardDiego 2y ago

No infra team cos cloud? And AI will handle it? Oh my sweet summer child.

OutOfHere 2y ago
AI does assist with developing an automated deployment pipeline. AI also assists with the use of CPU-efficient programming languages, e.g. Rust, Zig, etc. where one doesn't need a cluster of workers for a trivial service, where a single instance can be sufficient.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  The word "assists" is wonderfully vague there. And lol at the "cluster of workers for a trivial service", you seem to enjoy erecting men of straw to knock down.

ant6n 2y ago

It seems, just as an example, that ycombinator does not like solo founders.

OutOfHere 2y ago
The reason why VCs don't like solo founders is because VCs want the freedom and power to be able to kick out a founder. It is all the more reason for solopreneurs to detest VCs, to bootstrap their own thing instead.

merwerigh 2y ago

1. Insane statements 2. Lack of data 3. Advertising your own products I really thought it would be meaningful article but it just disappointed me :(

prmph 2y ago

The article starts out interesting: > But DeepSeek didn’t just build another AI model. They wrote their own parallel file system (3FS) to optimize costs—something that would have been unthinkable for a company of their size. This was possible because AI helped write the file system. I thought, hmm, now that’s interesting. But then the breathless leaps of faith comes quickly > Now, imagine what will happen in a couple of years—AI will be writing code, optimizing infrastructure, and even debugging itself. An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team. > This kind of disruption was previously limited to narrow consumer products like WhatsApp, where a 20-member team built a product that led to a $19 billion exit. But now, the same thing is happening in business applications that requires breadth Umm, not so fast, AI will not enable a couple of guys to write a robust production grade kernel in a couple of weeks or months, unless that kernel is simply a fork of Linux with some cosmetic tweaks. I always wonder, do the people making these sorts of pronouncements actually understand software? Have they built software of any significant size and depth? And then: > First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online). Sales teams have not been killed simply because distribution has moved online, although kind of sales people you need, and what they do, has certainly changed.

tetrisgm 2y ago

I remember when social media was the hype at the start of web2, and a bunch of people came in saying everything would be social. Then the same thing with cloud. Big data. Bitcoin. VR. Ethereum. Web3. NFTs. I mean AI is cool and it helps with some stuff. And it's also not going to be this epic panacea where rogue coders turn into the best entrepreneur they can be. To throw out such takes is just short sighted hype.